Facebook News Feed Preferences change to give you more control over what shows up

The News Feed is one of the most important parts of Facebook, so this is pretty big news. The social network has announced that it’s giving its users more ways to tweak what shows up in the News Feed.

This comes by way of a revamped News Feed Preferences menu, which launches on iOS today and will become available for Android and the Web “over the coming weeks”.

The new News Feed Preferences let you prioritize whose stuff you see first, easily unfollow people or reconnect with those you’ve previously unfollowed, and discover new pages. To make sure you don’t miss posts from specific friends and pages, you can prioritize them. Then, every time you launch Facebook, you’ll see the stuff they shared since you last visited the social network at the top of the News Feed, with a star attached (so you know why that’s there). If you scroll down, you’ll then get the rest of your News Feed normally.

“Discover New Pages” is basically just a collection of recommended pages that Facebook thinks you should like, based on the types of pages you’ve liked in the past. You’ve always been able to unfollow people from their profile, but now you can choose to do that from the new Unfollow menu in News Feed Preferences too, if you so wish. Presumably this should be more useful for bulk operations. You can also see who you’ve unfollowed in the past, and choose to re-follow them.

The new News Feed Preferences can be accessed in the iOS app by tapping on More in the bottom right corner, then going to Settings.